All posts by joelcrabb

This may be slight deviation from normal, but the end of the Kenilworth Trail is coming today (May 13, 2019), which is a bike path that has featured highly in my life. Whatever you think of the light rail that will be built in the corridor for the next three years, it will destroy one of the most highly used bike paths in the US so that suburban commuters can get downtown faster and bypass Minneapolis. That’s what the light rail is doing, it’s routed through the far west side of Minneapolis through one of the least populated portions because it’s faster than taking it through Uptown and down Nicollet, which might actually serve some Minneapolitans.

I estimated today that I’ve ridden portions of the Kenilworth trail over 10,000 times in the last 20 years. How did I get to that number:

Bike commuted downtown for 13 years, 2x per day, ~200 times (yes I biked all winter for many of these years. ~5200 rides.

For 20 years, from April to November, I generally ride to do daily errands: trips to Vertical Endeavors, Target, Walgreens, Punch Pizza, Barnes and Noble, Whole Foods, Lunds, Byerly’s, etc. On weekends it’s probably 4 trips per day, weekdays and extra 0.5 trips per day. ~7290

For 10 years estimate 30 trips downtown to Twins games, fireworks, restaurants and brew pubs in the evenings per summer: ~300

Probably another 1000 rides for fun and exercise with the kids, dog and friends

So in the past 20 years, I’ve ridden portions of the Kenilworth trail approximately 13,790 times. That’s likely an underestimate if anything.

There’s a lot of memories on that trail. I used to rollerblade with a Burley with two kids (in the 2-6 range) in it around Cedar lake. One time I’m not sure what I was thinking but I was swinging the kids side to side for fun. I got a bit to aggressive and flipped the Burley on it’s side and proceed to crash myself. Luckily, the kids were fine, and I escaped with minor roadrash.

I used to run our dog, Callahan, down the path to get him some quick exercise. I would ride my bike, he would run alongside, he was very well behaved. One day though, as I was riding back down the path, I slipped the leash over my handlebar by accident. Callahan abruptly stopped to do some business, and in these cases I usually just dropped the leash. This time though when I dropped it, it caught the handlebar and pulled the front wheel sideways. I took a header over the bars and somehow landed it on my feet, jamming my hip and causing future arthritis. These were my only two crashes on the Kenilworth.

A number of friends and I would go brew pub hopping in the evening for many years. We’d ride to Northeast and hit a few pubs and ride back, often without lights. There’s nothing like riding the Kenilworth at night with no lights, it’s pitch black and you can barely see the path. One night, and I swear this is true, after turning off the path and passing the Cedar Lake South Beach around 1AM, there were about 30 naked teenage girls getting ready to go skinny dipping. It was like riding past Ulysses’s Sirens, except that there was one older lady standing under the streetlight with a clipboard, likely ensuring the Sirens earned their skinny dipping merit badges.

It’s funny but there are a lot more stories simply about riding and walking down an amazing urban bike path. These don’t exist in other cities, and now it will no longer exist in ours. I filmed my last ride down the Kenilworth, it’s not the greatest, but this is what is now gone:

Holiday is mostly past us going into the new year of 2019 which means we retailers are starting to have some time again. The start of the year is when people think about making resolutions with the intent of improving themselves. For the past ten years at least, my resolution has always been to “eat more pie.” It’s an easy resolution to keep and it makes me happy to accomplish it every year.

It’s better to be more intentional about what you are learning, so skip the resolution and take some action. In the last year I took a deep dive into Distributed Ledgers (DL, better known as Blockchains) to determine how we might use them at Target. This turned out to be a much harder problem that it sounds, use you can use a DL for anything really, but it only makes sense in specific contexts where you are actually sharing data with external partners.

Second, I gave a presentation on technical culture rather than technology. It was a first to talk about building engineering culture, even though it’s what I’ve done for most of my career. But it was important to put Target on the map as a leading technical retailer. Five minutes from the keynote is below, but there’s also a 45 minute talk if you have access to Pluralsight.

Outside work, I learned silver smithing and attained the rank of amateur. I generally need something inside and outside work to keep me busy. Plus, you can give the finished products away and it makes people happy. An almost finished ring below:

This will be the last entry in this series, at least for the foreseeable future. Writing all this out has finally put this era of life firmly in the past, even though there were three more years of work to deliver an infinitely scalable cloud based ecommerce system. This really only scratched the surface of the amount of work and amazing team that delivered mobile and browser based ecommerce to TWLER during a time of incredible hardship for the company. New CEOs, falling revenue, and insanely tough competition left many to think TWLER was going to wind up as another retailer on the trash heap of history. But steady 30% growth online and an ecommerce platform that allowed for intra-day changes to the system gave the business teams the tools they needed to drive growth and make up for lost revenue in the stores. If you look at the revenue numbers for 2012-2014, store revenue declined, online increased and it all more or less evened out. Now onto the story.

There’s a running joke at TWLER that this Holiday is the most important Holiday ever! It’s funny because it actually is true, if you don’t deliver at Holiday, you go into oblivion like all the other failed electronics retailers like Circuit City and HH Gregg.

We went into early November scorching hot, cloud home page ramped up through the summer to take 100% of traffic, and cloud PDPs were still ramping up as we went into November. We had adopted the strategy of shunting small amounts of traffic to our new systems, than turning up the dial with global load balancing as we learned how to operate them. Remember, everything was new. We were operating in AWS for the first time, we had built all new UIs, controllers, caches, data services, and content management systems from scratch in about 10 months. We were also beating the hell out of Akamai as we load tested our systems and determined what we would cache in the CDN. Given how quickly inventory and pricing could change, we had to choose carefully what was cached in Akamai.

We were running three load tests a week trying to get the entire system up to a point that was 50% higher in traffic and transactions from the previous year. We figured 50% was a fairly safe bet considering historical traffic trends showed that we would likely only get a 20% traffic increase. The only place to truly stress test for scale was in production, so we would run the tests starting after midnight and ramp them up to full scale by 3AM. Obviously that meant a lot of late nights for the testing teams and many of the development teams as problems were uncovered at higher and higher scale.

The second week in November, the marketing team decided that the current pricing signage wasn’t good enough, it was going to be a highly promotional holiday and we needed everyone to know our pricing was as low as anyone’s. The team wanted to change all price messaging to “Guaranteed lowest price” from something else, with info on how we would price match any major competitor. The UI team estimated in the old system, it would take 3 months to make those changes; in the new cloud home page and PDPs, it took us two hours. Most of it was testing. This more than anything else, guaranteed that we would go into holiday with the cloud site taking full load even though business teams still weren’t completely bought in to the new world.

By the week of Thanksgiving, we were seeing good load tests and meeting our estimated peak loads for the Black Friday sale, which started at 2AM on Thanksgiving morning. Everyone knew when the sale was supposed to drop, and most shoppers were willing to wait up until 2AM central time, buy the limited inventory items, and then go to bed.

As 2AM rolled around, we felt like we were ready, we estimated we would take 60% of the load in AWS for home page and PDPs, and the remaining load for search and checkout would go to the ATG clusters in the datacenter. Caches were warmed, systems were scaled out to meet the load, and teams were in place to monitor everything that happened.

When the sale dropped, traffic ramped up instantly and kept rising minute over minute. We blew past 50% increase in traffic that was estimated and approached 150% increase in peak traffic. We figured out that the old systems simply couldn’t scale to demand, so the peak traffic was likely depressed and spread out over more time when the system throttled, but with systems that elastically scaled, the peak traffic just kept growing. This was ok in the cloud systems, but we were approaching scale way beyond expected in the commerce back end. As ATG servers heated up and the database was being pounded, we were minutes away from throttling traffic when the peak subsided and we had weathered the first storm.

Over the course of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, TWLER had its most successful online holiday ever, as competitor ecommerce sites melted down all around us. Virtually every retailer was down at some point over that time period, but we survived. Lots of things failed, including tax and inventory systems, but tax can be estimated and fixed before shipping, and you can guess at inventory for some amount of time until you run into trouble. While we remained up, the days and nights were spent fighting scaling issues, database issues, back end services issues, and network issues. When Cyber Monday ended successfully, the team felt like it had been fighting fires for five days straight.

The post mortem on the new cloud based systems was that it saved TWLER from catastrophe. Previously skeptical business and tech team members saw the front ends take massive loads and scale up accordingly. All the problems occurred in the legacy systems and enterprise services. It wasn’t flawless, but it showed that the investment was worth it and the direction was correct. It was my third holiday, and certainly the most exciting one ever. The architecture that I envisioned was starting to come to life, the teams we created banded together and bonded over intense problem solving, and the cloud future of TWLER.com was cemented with a successful holiday showing.

The next three years continued the evolution from ATG to cloud distributed architecture. While there were some rocky times and numerous outages during holidays, we survived them all and ended up at a fully automated future. Holiday’s became boring, and the only fun was watching daily revenue increase and pass $200M in a single day. Otherwise we just hung out and watched the metrics roll in, the mantra became “bring it on!” as we wished for higher traffic to truly test our systems.

And with that boredom, came the desire for a new challenge, which eventually took me away from TWLER in 2016 to take on restructuring the architecture for an entire company. That story may appear here someday, but it is still in progress.

Thanks to everyone that worked on TWLER.com from 2010-2015, it was truly a journey worth taking.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Kelly Goetsch and Dirk Hoerig to record an interview on Target’s engineering culture as part of their Commerce Tomorrow podcast. Kelly was in town for the Open Source North conference which we were both speaking at. We sat down in the Target recording studio to tape the show. I’ve been using the studio to create an internal podcast for Target Engineering so we had an audio engineer and figured out how to include Dirk from Germany.

Part XXI of a multipart series. To start at the beginning goto Part I.

This is the last entry before we actually get to Holiday 2012. But before we get there I would be remiss if I didn’t document the organizational changes that happened over the course of 2012, and how we fought to keep our project intact. If you go back to 2012 and take a look at the TWLER stock price, you’ll see that bad things were afoot. The stock price dropped from somewhere around $25 to under $12 in the first few months of the year. Things needed a shakeup badly.

The CEO of TWLER in early 2012 had been brought up in the stores context and largely ignored the digital channel. But pressure to bring in some youthful talent must have been high as in March of 2012 we learned we had a new President of Digital we’ll call Esteban Schick, or ES from now on. ES had the digital world and took over IT and became the acting CIO as the current CIO was forced out. That did mean that we all had a new EVP over digital and all investments would be reviewed.

But, before that could happen, more wacky changes occurred. Literally the next month, April 2012, the TWLER CEO was forced to resign due to inappropriate conduct that you’ll have to figure out for yourself. Additionally, the CMO left a few months later. With an interim CEO, ES was granted marketing and effectively was in charge of half the company after being with TWLER for only a few months.

Well, this kept ES quite busy so the review of all investments in IT and Digital went quite slowly. It wasn’t until mid-summer of 2012 that we finally got in front of ES to review the first $13M investment to rewrite TWLER.com. We brought our architecture team and business leads to this meeting with the necessary deck and strategic direction. As we introduced ourselves, we went around the table and seven people introduced themselves as various architects for TWLER.com. ES was not impressed, and after we finished introducing ourselves, his first statement was “at EstrellaDinero (psuedonym), we had one architect, everyone else was engineers.”

In 2018, the fact that a large company no longer employed architects is not a shocking statement, much of the market is going this direction. In 2012 in the Midwest, this was devastating to my pride. I had spent my career building up to Chief Architect at a Fortune 50. Now, architecture was being disparaged by our new tech and digital leader!

I hid my feelings well and started in on our presentation. We always started with how we operated, rather than what we were building. We wanted to ensure we distinguished ourselves from the rest of TWLER by outlining our Agile/DevOps/Co-located/Small team strategy. No one else at TWLER was operating at scale in Agile, we had built up a team of close to 100 engineers, all on-site, working on 13 different teams. I’d hazard to say it was one of the largest all-Agile teams in the Twin Cities at the time.

As we worked through the presentation, ES started to appear more comfortable and asked a lot of questions, probing our understanding of Agile and Engineering practices. After the first 45 minutes of a schedule hour, he was now energetic and highly engaged. His comment was, “this is the first team I’ve met that understands software engineering.”

Now ES was an EVP, and EVPs have tight schedules and people wait months to meet with them. But at this point, ES called his admin and rescheduled to stay another hour with us. I knew we had won him over at this point and dove into the technology strategy to rewrite TWLER.com.

How we built TWLER.com is the subject of most of this blog, but at a high level we were building a service-oriented (no microservices yet!) distributed cloud-based auto-scaling multi-layered cloud and datacenter zero downtime ecommerce platform.

ES was impressed with our team, said keep up the good work, and basically left us on our own for the rest of his tenure. Which lasted until December 2012.

There were two other notable changes prior to Holiday of 2012. TWLER hired a new CEO we’ll just call HJ, and ES hired a President of Digital to take over that part of the company for him, ScottyD.

With a new CEO and a new Digital leader, we ended up having two more similar investment reviews in 2012. Remember, this was the first year of completely converting TWLER.com to a new ecommerce platform architecture. It would have been an easy time for a new CEO or CDO to make their mark on the company by bringing in some “real experts” to take over the dotcom rebuild. In fact, the rumors were that the leadership team had multiple talks with large outside vendors to determine how they could take over TWLER.com. I’m not privy to what actually occurred in those talks and meetings, but in our time reviewing the project with the CEO and CDO, we did impress them with our direction and strategy.

To recap, from November of 2011 to December of 2012, I sold three EVPs and a CEO, in four separate meetings, on the fact that we were the best team possible to rebuild the fourth highest scaling ecommerce site in North America, with revenue approaching $2B. At the end of 2012 we were still there, so it must have worked.

The next phase of our move to the cloud in 2012 was to build the Cloud Product Detail Page (PDP). The detail pages are where you land when you select a product from a list or advertisement. It generally has the price, product description, reviews, questions and the all important Add to Cart button.

Cloud Home Page was the first foray into moving TWLER.com to the cloud, but we needed to move more parts of the site to the cloud to reach the scale we were looking for during Holiday. To achieve the goals of our architecture, we were attempting to move the 90+% of site traffic that is people landing on the home page, searching for products and viewing product details. In an eCommerce site, the majority of traffic is simply looking at products and learning about them, only a small portion of traffic makes it to the checkout process.

The Home Page was a fairly straightforward task since we were redesigning the whole page as we rebuilt it. The PDP was much more difficult. First, there were eleven PDPs which all spawned from a single PDP five or ten years ago. Second, the content in the content management system contained custom HTML embedded within the content making it extremely difficult to reuse the existing content. But with 500,000 items in the content system, it wasn’t possible to rework all the content while building out the new PDPs. Besides, the way we were building out the system, the business wanted the ability to fall back on the original PDPs in case the new ones failed. We hadn’t yet gained the trust of the business teams in our first year of rebuilding TWLER.com.

We decided an engineering solution was the only likely way to solve this problem of bridging the old content to the new system. We set some enterprising engineers on the problem; we simply tasked them with figuring out a way to make the existing content work with the new page templates.

We then set out to determine how many new PDP templates we could accomplish by Holiday of 2012. We decided to simply tackle the two highest trafficked PDP templates, computers and TVs. These two PDPs accounted for well over 50% of the traffic to the site. The schedule for the remaining PDP templates went until Holiday 2013.

But there was nothing easy about this task, we struggled with the business to define the new look of the PDPs, we needed to build a framework that allowed most of the PDP to be cached at the Content Delivery Network (CDN) so we could achieve 80-90% page offload to the CDN. We needed to push all that content out of the datacenter for the first time, and have it cached in the cloud. We needed to do this across multiple cloud availability zones. And we needed to meet our page construction SLAs of less than two seconds.

At the time, there were no other retailers pushing into clouds that we knew of, so we were designing the architecture as we went, working with the problems as they came. We tackled content replication via NoSQL databases in a hub and spoke model, only pushing the item data to the cloud and not allowing updates to that content. We built a massive service aggregation forward cache using Memcached that we used to cache the majority of service calls. Netflix Hystrix came out right at this time and we quickly switched from the homegrown version we had been making to the Netflix distribute service management framework. We had to add dynamic page construction to allow for a small amount of personalization. The problems of running a PDP out of a cloud were numerous and difficult.

The overarching Architecture principal throughout this whole effort was to serve all browse traffic completely out of the cloud. That meant getting all product information, pricing, promotions and inventory to the cloud. For this year, we settled on drawing inventory from the datacenter and only calculating promotions when people entered the checkout process. These required business compromises such as language in the cart that said “promotions will be applied at checkout.” But without these compromises, there was simply too much work to get done.

We somehow managed to spin up all the teams necessary to make the new PDP a reality, and get the work done. We relied on great engineers solving problems on their own rather than waiting for high level decisions or guidance. They didn’t fail us. In fact, they worked out a way to strip out all the HTML tags from the content system on the fly so that the existing content would work for both the new and old PDPs simultaneously.

Chalk another win up for great engineering!

We were now ready to enter Holiday 2012 with two major pieces of cloud browsing in place, Cloud Home Page and Cloud PDP.

As we eased into 2012 and we continued to build up our teams at TWLER.com, the IT leadership decided that they needed to get their integrators more information on the architecture and technology we were pursuing. We were rapidly hiring software engineers to staff up to 50 people over the next couple months, which meant we were sourcing engineers wherever we could find them. Over the course of a few weeks, I proceeded to have 2+ hour meetings with all the major IT integrators, C* G*, I**, A*, T*T*, W*P* and a few others. I gave my TWLER.com architecture presentation to each of the integration teams. At this point I’d probably given this presentation a hundred times. The integrators had sent their top technical architects and salespeople to these meetings. They would have been better off without the salespeople waylaying the conversation, but the tech people tried to tone them down.

Having worked with most of the major integrators in the past, I wanted only a few things: experienced engineers and continuity. That is, I didn’t want a whole team of fresh out of college engineers that I would have to train up on engineering, we just didn’t have time for extensive training. (A few years later we started an internship and college hiring program to give new graduates a great experience at TWLER.) Secondly, I wanted the engineers to stay long enough to be effective, like a year or two.

Probably a third of the candidates that were sent to interview were good enough to join the team. However, during the interview process I made it clear that I expected them to stay one year, and they were expected to code 100% of their billable hours.

Given these simple criteria, the individual consultants that came through self selected out of the project. The technical folks thought the project would be a great experience, but they were all in career building mode in their firms. My project would set them back a year against their peers, as they would only account for their own billable hours.

After about two months of interviews, our IT team finally got angry. They decided to sit in on one of the interviews to determine why we either kept rejecting candidates, or the ones we liked declined to show up. I thought that was a great idea, and said they should get one of the integrators to send their best candidate to the interview.

So we scheduled an interview with T*T* later that week, I was sent a resume of a lead engineer that looked good. When the day arrived and the interview was about to start, I met one of our IT Senior Directors at the interview room. The candidate was escorted in by the T*T* representative and we started introductions. It turned out the candidate wasn’t the person from the resume.

Well, that was a surprise and the TWLER Senior Director was ticked. But I said, give me this new person’s resume and let’s do the interview. So we all sat down with the new person they had sent in as their “best candidate” and started into the questions. This all turned out rather badly because the new candidate had no web background and rather limited technology skills. The interview consisted of repeated failures to answer junior level easy software engineering questions. Like, “what are the four basic SQL commands?” It was an unmitigated disaster.

Afterwards, I reiterated that this was why we interviewed everyone that applied, it wasn’t the normal practice, but if I’m paying a high hourly rate for an engineer, than I want to make sure they’re good at engineering.

Over the course of the next few months this continued to be a good practice. We had video interviews where the candidates refused to turn on their video feeds and you could hear someone else typing in the background and feeding the candidate answers. We had more instances of random people showing up for an interview whose resumes were never screened. We had good interviews where we wanted the candidate, and someone else showed up for the first day of work! When engineers are hard to find, all sorts of shenanigans begin to happen.

Part XVIII in a multipart series, to start at the beginning, goto Part I.

2012 was the year that I really began working for the VP of Operations at TWLER, Judy D. In 2011, the Chief Architect for TWLER decided to leave as the investment in the rewrite of TWLER.com was cut in half, see Part VII for more on that episode. Over the course of 2011, I became the main point of contact for the team, but didn’t completely take over till later that year.

To this point in my career, I had been leading many large Enterprise Java programs, mainly as a consultant, and had just finished an MBA. I had about 18 months of pure engineering management at United Health Group, having a team of about 25 writing online wellness programs. However, that management position didn’t end well, and I learned much and more about politics at large companies.

I did not have an extensive track record of management, but because I had spearheaded the funding effort and defined the vision for the future Ecommerce platform, I became the manager of the team and was promoted to Director. Much of the work we did is detailed here, or will be detailed here in the future, today the discussion is about having a great manager as coach.

I’m going to say, as a manager, I was very rough. During my time at UHG, I had four managers in 18 months, so I received very little direction or coaching. As the lead Architect and Engineer on many programs, I was only interested in software competency and delivering systems. If you couldn’t help me do that, you were dead to me. I was rightly accused of being blunt, straightforward and lacking empathy at this point in my career. I didn’t really care, I knew how to hire great engineers, build teams where everyone had fun while delivering more than asked, and being a total pain-in-the-ass to whoever was lucky enough to manage me.

But Judy decided to invest her time and started giving me feedback on how I was acting and how I was being perceived. It was the first time in my career that someone had explained perception being reality, not logic and data. In meetings with the VPs and Senior Directors in IT, I would get worked up because they knew how to push my buttons. Once you’re in attack mode, you’ve lost the room; everyone thinks that if you can’t manage yourself here, you must not be a good manager overall. Judy helped me understand how to deflect criticisms and attacks on my project’s direction, by acknowledging the speakers point, and then presenting why I thought our direction would work. Never directly saying the other person was wrong, just that our current direction was working.

Learning the managerial arts of controlling meetings, protecting my reputation, and letting others be right (even when they were wrong), helped my project thrive by giving me the tools to fend off the IT team without offending them or giving them ammunition to take back to their leaders.

Judy always took the high road, she didn’t care if others were being assholes, it wasn’t an excuse to be an asshole too. She would always let me know she’s heard about my latest escapades at meetings across the company. She no longer wanted to hear negative news; she only wanted to hear how I was helping people, nothing else.

This process was long; Judy would debrief me after meetings and point out exactly where I lost the room and when I went off on a rant. But I was willing to listen, and I corrected my mistakes. Over time, it was as if I had been in management my entire career. I had learned to manage my reactions, while also managing the outcomes of the meetings and the perception of my team and myself.

I can’t thank Judy enough for the coaching effort she put in to teach me to be a Director at TWLER, and later a VP for Fortune 100 companies.

Part XVII of a multipart series, to start at the beginning, goto Part I.

In the ongoing development of TWLER.com (The World’s Largest Electronics Retailer), the actual process of building of the system was severely neglected over the years. The first thing that we established as a team back in 2010 was a new set of build infrastructure (Git, Jenkins, Artifactory, Chef) so that engineer’s had actual continuous integration tools to work with.

Aside: Continuous Delivery was just appearing at this time. We had Jez Humble, author of the seminal Continuous Delivery book, in to talk to us about his ideas in early 2011. This was a small gathering of about 15 engineers and architects who were interested in the concept that we eventually implemented at TWLER.com.

The biggest problem with writing software at TWLER was the lower environments. As we were breaking up the monolithic ATG application into distributed components, the lower environments were still geared towards single ATG application delivery. We had DEV, TEST, INT, STAGE, BREAKFIX, and PROD environments. STAGE and BREAKFIX were marginally close replicas of PROD, but it was really not possible to create true replica environments. The environments were not well segregated either, we found on numerous occasions PROD applications accessing services and data from non-PROD environments. In the overwhelming realm of things to fix, this wasn’t even a top priority.

We decided we had to replace the DEV and TEST environments. DEV was basically non-functional, it was one large server that all 1000+ engineers were trying to use to integrate their code. Builds constantly failed, even when they succeeded the results were often unusable. It could take you all day to just try and get one change built and hope the results were something you could work with. Most people just skipped DEV and went right to TEST, which was an actual managed environment.

We decided that a lower environment PaaS was the direction we wanted to go. We wanted every engineer at TWLER to be able to spin up every application at TWLER in their own private sandbox. That way engineers would have to ability to test their systems in isolation, while still using the latest component versions of everyone else’s system.

To achieve that we decided to build an OpenStack environment and a homegrown PaaS. But how to get the capital to create the OpenStack environment? At the time, mid-2011, I had excess dollars assigned as resource capital, it was meant to only be used on hiring engineers. In my projects at the time, we were still proving out the chosen architecture and were ending the year with excess resource capital. At the time, TWLER was extremely controlling of capital, you either had resource capital, or hardware investment capital, but not both.

So I went on a reconnaissance mission to find someone with investment capital that needed resources to see if we could trade. After a couple weeks of hunting, and getting the financial managers of TWLER involved, we finally found a team that was willing to trade their investment capital for resources. We swapped $150k and used that money to buy three OpenCompute racks to build out our OpenStack environment. We estimated with high density OpenCompute, we could house about 5000 VMs on OpenStack. If we stuck with the company standard hardware, HP, we would only be able to build out an environment that housed 1000 VMs with those dollars.

We knew that if we were successful, we would want to expand the OpenStack environment quickly. We decided on full automation from bare metal to operating OpenStack and proceeded down the path using Crowbar and Chef to build out the roll-in racks to OpenStack. At the same time we started building out the PaaS framework, Omnitank, and getting teams on-board to truly fully automate their deployments so their components could be included in the PaaS. This adventure was documented at OpenStack summit as one of the keynotes in front of 2000+ attendees.

This PaaS was so successful, we were able to shutdown our DEV and TEST environments. We also allowed engineers from around the company to use the OpenStack environment. We actually had hundreds of forward thinking engineers from the enterprise side of TWLER using our OpenStack PaaS as it was the fastest way to get a test environment created.

It was so successful that when we had our first major outage and lost all environments, there were numerous enterprise teams that were down for weeks rebuilding their environments. We used this as a lesson to learn which teams actually automated their infrastructure, and which teams were polishing virtual chrome. But we did have to explain to IT VPs that this whole environment was still in beta, and it was use at your own risk.

Part XVI of a multipart series, to start at the beginning, goto Part I.

As much as I love disparaging ATG, it was actually built as an all-inclusive platform, which, at the time, was a modern way to build systems. ATG had a built in Inversion of Control framework prior to Spring. It had a set of tag libraries and did its best to help teams build ecommerce sites quickly in a J2EE application server manner. It just wasn’t ever meant to scale to level we needed in 2012, the architecture was wrong. Everything you did trigged calls to the single database instance, there was no caching so a promotion calculation would be run every time a customer wanted to see the promotional price. With two million concurrent users, all interested in the latest promotions, this is a disaster. Any problem in any part of the system brought down the whole application. We needed to evolve from monolith to distributed.

Similarly, by 2012, deploying massive EAR files had been a dead architecture choice for at least five years. Tying everything together into one massive deployment was the opposite direction of the Agile/DevOps movement springing up with the Continuous Deployment mania.

But this was the legacy we faced at TWLER (The World’s Largest Electronics Retailer). We were ten years into unchecked ATG development with thirteen applications deployed on the platform, all rolled up into that 2GB EAR. You can only imagine the quarterly deployment nightmare, literally a waking nightmare as all deployments were overnight affairs, but that’s the fodder for another post.

We dedicated a team to figuring out how to deconstruct our ATG implementation and code. The codebase was series of interconnected, circularly coupled, packages. There were five or ten main packages that were used by all the applications so that a change to one package, would inevitably break 2-3 applications. Thus, an eight week QA cycle was necessary to ensure all the integrated code from 1000s of engineers would result in thirteen working applications.

But if you can’t throw it out, and you can’t break functionality, what do you do?

The first course of action was to modernize the build. It wasn’t actually possible to build the ATG application on a developer machine. The only way to build the application was by kicking off a build in the developer integration environment. Thus, if you were an engineer working on ATG, you could make a bunch of changes to your code, check them in to the CVS source control system, and kick off a build. Imagine 1000 engineers all trying to do this at the same time.

The developer integration environment was overwhelmed by the number of build requests so instead of on-demand, it would schedule 2-3 builds per day. So 1000 engineers trying to get their code in for 30 different projects to build together, guess the result of the build? If you guessed broken, than good job! You’ve worked in an enterprise environment in the mid-2000s!

To solve all these problems wasn’t easy, but the playbook is straightforward:

We had to automate the build so anyone could run it.

We had to separate the applications so you could just build the one you were working on.

We had to come up with a solution for the developer laptop, so you could build and run the ATG server locally.

We had to decide what portions of the ATG code to invest in and what to throw out.

We had to break the dependencies between the ATG packages so developers could work on things in isolation.

We had to automate the changes in the database so a local DB could be built and modified on the developer’s machine.

We had to fix the integration environment so if wasn’t constantly failing.

Many might think this was a throwaway investment and not worth the time or effort. We faced those challenges internally to TWLER as well. But, we were able to convince leadership that in order to move quickly in the future, we needed to move faster now in our legacy architecture. We would be using portions of ATG for the next three years at least, and we wouldn’t be able to complete our new work without augmenting the existing systems.

Looking back on it, I’m happy to report that the decision to invest in ATG as we dismantled it, was a good one.